You may have noticed there’s no Essay this week. This is for a variety of small reasons, some of which involve going fishing. We’ll resume our regular schedule next week. I think this is only the second time in over 4 years that we’ve missed an essay. Later this week I should have a fun…
On March 25th, 2015, I published Rarst’s HeroPress essay “Finding Your Place“. It’s been four years. As of this post there are 165 essays published. 165 stories of dreams, successes, failures, and courage. 165 people I’ve gotten to know and love. It feels like it’s always been there. For a while this last year I…
A couple years ago I noticed that someone had done a talk at WordCamp Brighton called “The Hero’s Journey“. As you can imagine it immediately caught my eye and I went hunting to find this cool person. As it turns out it was Tamsin Taylor from Brighton and she had a great story. As I…
In the early days of HeroPress there were quite a few Indian contributors, for a variety of reasons. India has long been a technology powerhouse, but the WordPress community was just beginning to get traction. I got to meet many Indians and even traveled there for WordCamp Pune. The stereotype that “India is cheap” is…
About a year ago, Christie Chirinos wrote the essay “What I Do Does Not Define Who I Am“. It felt like a big deal at the time, and it was, but like most big deals, it slowly faded from memory. That’s one of the reasons I do these replays, for the benefit of my own…
When HeroPress started, a stated intention was to be a voice for people on the fringe of the Western WordPress culture. In my head I thought this geographical, and involved places like Africa and Asia. I quickly came to realize that everyone is on the fringe of something. This month’s HeroPress replay is titled “Doing…
A couple years ago I was at Prestige Conf in Minneapolis. I noticed a young woman sitting by herself, patiently waiting for the talks to start, and thought I’d say hi. Her name was Stacey, and she was a freelance web developer and design expert. She was had recently quit her job to go freelance…
It’s no secret that HeroPress was greatly helped in its early days by people from India. Jeet, Saurabh, Aditya, Alexander, and many others gave deep and meaningful advice on how I, as a white American male, should approach the task I had set before me. This is one of the reasons it makes me so…
One of the things I’ve loved most about HeroPress is getting to know people far away. It’s getting harder and harder to name a country where I can’t say “Hey, I have a friend there!”. This week I’m in Australia for WordCamp Sydney, and I’m crazy excited about all the people I’m going to meet….
Being a remote worker makes it easy to hide from a world that you find scary or dangerous. If you’re never in the presence of other people they can’t hit you. Retreat becomes so easy. Marius Jensen from Sola, Norway grew up in a society that did not care for him, and made him want…
